How to do laundry in space: You don’t

Sarah B. BoxerProducerAugust 19, 2015

How to do laundry in space: You don’t

Nearly halfway into his historic year of living in space, astronaut Scott Kelly tells Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric what day-to-day life is like aboard the International Space Station. There are no washing machines, lots of Seinfeld reruns... and you might not want to know what's in the water.

Ever wish you had a better view from your office window? Astronaut Scott Kelly has one of the best in the universe — and he’s happy to share it.

Kelly is almost halfway through a historic year in space — a mission called  Expedition 44, primarily designed to see whether an astronaut would be able to handle a trip to Mars, which NASA estimates could take about 500 days roundtrip.

Speaking to Yahoo global news correspondent Katie Couric, Kelly said that he’s holding up just fine 145 days into the journey.  “I feel pretty good,” he said. “Five months is a long time to be up here, and I have a long way to go. … But so far, so good.”

Kelly is aboard the International Space Station with five other astronauts, working on 400 different experiments.  He says their days are full of  “science, maintenance and general housekeeping.”

But what is life really like, day to day?  Kelly told Couric that he spends his downtime reading, watching “Seinfeld” repeats and engaging with his social media following (he has more than 356K Twitter followers).

He also revealed that astronauts don’t do laundry — “it would be pretty complicated to make a space washer,” he said.  Instead, they discard their clothes after wearing them multiple times.  In fact, Kelly said he’s been wearing the same pair of pants for about two months.

Kelly told Couric that most of their water is made from urine and condensate from the atmosphere.  He assured her that the water was very good quality — “probably better than what comes out of my faucet,” he said.

While Kelly is in space, his twin brother — retired astronaut Mark Kelly — is on Earth, serving as a control in an experiment on how the two men are changing this year.  Scott Kelly told Couric he’s happy he’s the one in space, and wouldn’t want to trade places his brother on the ground — except for their very different diets. “Occasionally, he’ll send me a picture of his food,” he said, “and at those times, when I’m eating something brown in a bag, I envy the steak he’s sending me a picture of.”

https://www.yahoo.com/katiecouric/scott-kelly-international-space-station-interview-127097525518.html